Game Creation Now Limited to Fight Botting

Posted By: June 13, 2012

Approximately eleven years after a similar measure might have helped save the Diablo II economy from Pindlebots, Blizzard has implemented a limit on the number of games an account can create in a short period of time. Here’s their official announcement, plus the update a few hours later, when they had to turn it off for more fine tuning.

We’ve recently added a limit to the number of games a player can create within a certain amount of time. Players who hit this limit will see the error: “Input limit reached. Please wait to perform more actions.” After receiving this error, you will need to wait approximately 10 to 15 minutes before creating any additional games.

This change was made to help reduce server strain and improve overall game stability, and we’ll continue to monitor the situation and make additional improvements as necessary. We’re currently working to find a solution that allows most players who are playing normally to create games without encountering this error, but will still limit some of the more extreme cases of rapid game creation. We appreciate your patience as we make these adjustments.

10:00 PM PDT- After looking into some reports from players it seems the limit may have not been working exactly as intended. Working properly you really shouldn’t see it, even in fairly normal ‘farming’ conditions, or reasonable amounts of character swapping. We’re shutting off the limitations off until we can take a better look at it tomorrow.

Comments

Of course people can object to this. This will shut down alot of legit farming such as Goblin runs and XP runs that in no way is connected to botting/hacking. It will limit how people can play and enjoy the game.

Depends on how they set it up though, and it seems they did not succed with that on their first try.

This is much worse than it was in D2 because they have set up a system where you have to go in and out of game a lot. For one thing, there is no in-game implementation of the Auction House, like in many games.

Also, Blizzard set it up so to do multiple quests throughout the acts, you have to constantly start new games. You can’t just jump around to various waypoints. It works fine, but cause a lot more legit game creation.

Not to mention that for anyone who cares about achievements (embarrassed to say I do), they have made achievements that are entirely based around act jumping. (Anyone try to get the conversations achievements without starting dozens of games back to back.)

They have created a game that makes more game creation a necessity and not are limited the number we can create. What a fail.

I think this is a step in the right direction but also agree with you that it will have unintended and irritating side effects for legit users.

Additionally the only way you can quickly reset a vendor is to restart the game. I don’t do this a lot but have from time to time when trying to find a reasonable blue item. This again is potentially a problem for normal users.

You cannot call this “a fail” without first seeing how it works in practice for regular gameplay. Assuredly Blizzard has considered the fast creation of games for achievements, etc. and are taking that into account. If it turns out this impacts the “act hopping” activity you describe, then sure, raise hell. However, Blizzard indicated in the announcement that they do not expect this to impact us regular players at all once they get it fully tuned. In any event, the rare times regular players encounter this error should not prevent this system from moving forward if it indeed limits botting.

Me and my friends were banned from ‘regular gameplay’ within 15 game creations. This was not goblin farming, or game exploitation. It was achievement farming, and that is certainly “regular gameplay.”

You’d have to be insanely lucky to just stumble across Bashiok in Act 1 normal. I had a friend (who is also insane) farm for him for 9 hours straight just get that achievement, and that was with constant leave/join operations (some people are really into the nerd points).

The way the game is currently constructed, game limitations like this one hurt regular play much more than it does botting. If you have any experience with Diablo 2’s bots, you’ll understand how sophisticated they are. When these limiters are implemented, script is adapted to maximize. Key rotation, account rotation, MAC address changes, etc. Bot scripts these days are very difficult to counter.

In the end, the average player suffers. I feel that this is why they’ve decided to disable and re-evaluate the situation before making any permanent decisions.

To be more clear, I am definitely on board with the idea that this should not limit regular gameplay like you have described. I too have done some achievement farming, such as remaking numerous and rapid games to find the Watch Tower and the vendor event inside.

My point was merely that we need to see how this works in practice before touting it as a problem because Blizzard appeared to me to indicate an awareness of the potential impact on such regular gameplay, and further implied that we should not be affected once they get the system fully tuned. Game communities tend to cry foul way before they have any evidence that something is harmful (and even sometimes when it doesn’t affect them at all), and so I felt the need to point out that we should at least wait and see!

However, from your post and the fact that they unimplemented this system to work on it, it appears that it is not working appropriately. I still do not think this is a cause to flame Blizzard given that they have indicated that they do not want this to affect us, but I see from the posts here based on D2 experience that this is a tightrope Blizzard may not be able to walk at all.

As always, Blizzard’s methods to fight botting only hurt legit players. The cheaters will continue to cheat. The bots will continue to run, the dupers will continue to dupe, the hackers will continue to hack.

This is a bad change, period. It’s treatment for a symptom, not for the problem. Blizzard needs to remove (most) of the reasons people want to repeatedly join and leave games. Take anything of value near a waypoint and remove it. You should have to at least kill 50 monsters to find a treasure goblin or resplendent chest. Also, letting players refresh the items for sale at a merchant would improve server performance, rather than forcing them to leave and rejoin just to see the items. I’d be okay with this if it was something like 5 minutes or less to wait, but 10 minutes or even 15 is way too long, especially because I’m sure the system won’t warn you when you’re close to the limit; you’ll just suddenly be put in time-out.

Another point of view – same shit happened in Diablo 2 basically. If they keep this around, we’ll just have to adjust to it. Not the end of the world, but a stupid move.

Oh I have a great way to reduce a ton of game creation strains but Blizzard never reads.

Just remove public games where the player/s is in town and put them back on the list when they go out fighting again. I wonder how many 100s of games I join where the player is afk/idle in town and I just quit and try a new game…I’m sure many many thousands of ppl do this all day long.

Muling seems pretty common in D3 still. Usually to distribute gear from the AH onto the right characters and keep stash space clear for new items.

Allowing transfer from the stash to characters, or directly from the completed auctions to characters would cut out a lot of game creation. The “sell” tab already shows character inventories and the stash so it would just need drag-and-drop and write access to the database.

Most likely Blizzard’s developers have already thought of this and the timelimits are an interim measure from the battle.net sysadmins.

I wonder if this change helps Warden spot botters, though? At least the botters need to reconfigure their bots.

I objected this in Diablo 2, because the best way to get items/XP was doing runs. Now we have Nephalem Valor and the max lvl is easily attainable if you just play the game through hell, so I’m happy about this limitation. It makes the way I always wanted to play D2 (and sometimes did, but had a nagging feeling that I could do this so much faster/better) actually the best way of playing in Diablo 3.

No it sucks its stupid. IT hurts legit mf runs who are not botting. and as far as imp runs are concerned.. out of like 500 ofthose I have gotten like.. 1 legendary. and 2 upgrades rest of the items went to friends who were with me or I sold or broke down. ITs not gamebreaking in anyway.

hurting those who need to do it to progress in act2.. try playing an inferno 2hand barb without spending 40 million.. then you will understand why many do the dam imp.

I’ve been leveling new toons and buying gear on the AH with +experience per kill and using a Star Ruby in a socketed helm since I was first able to wear one. With a great weapon and some decent +main stat gear, you can level extremely fast while progressing through the acts/difficulties.

My HC barb is lvl45 in Act 3 nightmare (just after the larder) and I haven’t been using an experience gem in my helm. I only entered a couple “optional” caves since the start, so apparently the gem doesn’t make that much difference?

If it has any affect at all, it will be on the non-botters. No matter how they tune it, the botters will simply add an appropriate delay or game counter and keep running 24 hours a day, gathering more gold and/or items than any legitimate user can.

The solution isn’t to prevent people from making a certain number of games. It’s to track unusual usage patterns like that and ban people when appropriate.

Hah I was leveling my Wizard last night and my friend was getting so enraged because he kept triggering this game delay without any warnings. He joined my hell game to play with me for a few minutes. Left to check AH and then he was going back to Act2 Inferno. Except the game creator defaulted him to Hell mode which I was in. So he quit the Hell game and he got the error while trying to create an Inferno game!! Have to wait 10 minutes for THAT????

Thank god this wasn’t implemented when I had to make 100s of games to do the achievements for the Ancient Device and getting the Mysterious Cave to spawn which took like 50 tries to get the item in it.

Great idea… put in achievements that really on lucky map spawns hence making several games quickly to find that spawn, then limit how many games someone can make. The brilliant minds at Blizzard strike again!

I am not really worried that i won’t be able to farm certain areas, i just like to check my stuff fast in game, get out, check AH, join friend, etc, etc. I may in minute join 5 games and if i get RD for doing this then it’s ridiculous.

Let me explain this to you: 1. They have enabled RMAH. 2. They want to make goblin runs impossible so the good/best items are difficult to obtain. 3. People will stockpile gold but the items better than mediocre will not be posted on GAH as there will be less of them. 4. People will post stuff on RMAH and it will be the only place to get good items.

If you think it’s to prevent boting than you’re stupid. If they would like to eliminate goblin farm runs then they’d randomize their spawn points.

The most BULLSHIT CRAP in D2 that is basically the only thing that RUINED the game besides bots/dupes/tppks. You can’t fuckin do this in a diablo game. Worst thing ever to happen was that you couldn’t farm LK chests and stuff like that ><

1) ZK solo runs on norm (reseting quest, for XP) 2) Highway Passage runs for XP on hell 3) Shadow runs (the area right before killing ZK, where you find the body)to farm gold and XP (those are longer, maybe I still can do them).

I play D2 SP (yep, still) and I love to do 30 sec pindle runs. It won’t affect me a lot now, since I have a Lvl 60 DH on A1 Inferno that doesn’t die every 5 sec for gold farming.

Anyway, I was surprised it wasn’t a feature yet. If the number is reasonable (max 5 games/10 min with the same char), I can see it as a necessary evil. Small problem:

– I join countless games to swap gear between my other 4 chars that are on similar spots (I use to clear an act with one, them another). – I got used to purchase a piece of medium gear from AR, equip it, back to AR if needed…

Maybe when everyone hits lvl 60 (they’re around lvl 40) I won’t need to, but now maybe I need…

I have no problems with that change, the game wasn’t designed to quit and create games over and over, if you were doing this like farming goblins or do the same quest over and over just because of the good XP or loot, it’s not the intended way to play the game, at least it shouldn’t be the >best< way to get XP or loot.

The intended way (from what I read from blue/dev posts) is to go everywhere and kill random champions because they drop the highest level loot. Killing super bosses is fine but they don't drop the best loot so it's not productive to farm them over and over, patch 1.03 will reflect that even more.

The problem is that what is intended has to match what is provided for it to be relevant to the argument. Customers have their own intents, which should be respected. Mistakes or shortcomings by the service provider can happen, and that is forgivable, but they need to fix problems instead of punish their customers for using what they’re given. Yes, the patch aims to fix things and get us closer to what the game was supposed to be about. Fantastic! It doesn’t excuse other behaviors though.

I feel like my car manufacturer is yelling at me for not flying my car around and instead keeping it on the roads. Not my problem it’s flight capabilities are limited. They have my money, I have their product, and I got it to satisfy a need/want. I’m going to use it to satisfy that to the best of its ability. Their previous car wasn’t advertised as air travel. The new car is great on the road. I have places to be. If they have a problem, they should show some respect for the people paying their bills and fix it instead of nagging us.

“Input limit reached. Please wait to perform more actions.” This is a great example of a horrible error message to give someone. It uses the very vague “actions” instead of “game creations”. Anyone who doesn’t follow D3 actively and doesn’t hear this news is going to be very confused if they get this error.

and the grumpy old wizard will continue to grump, about a game he hates, yet incessantly plays. take the nostalgia sunglasses off, the future will never be as bright as the false granduer of your supposed perfect d2.